Mobile computing devices with touch-sensitive displays such as smart phones and pad computing devices are two of the fastest growing categories of computing devices. These devices threaten to displace notebook and desktop computers as the preferred platform for many tasks that users engage in every day. Developers of these mobile devices have eschewed mouse and touchpad pointing devices in favor of on-screen graphical user interfaces and methods that have the user select content and edit content on touch-sensitive displays using direct manipulation of objects on the screen. Ording, et. al. describe one example of this current approach in US2010/0235770A1. However, the performance and usability of these current solutions is generally inferior to the mouse and/or touchpad based solutions commonly employed with conventional notebook and desktop devices. These current solutions do not support quick and precise pointing and selecting and dragging tasks for objects of all sizes. Whereas these current solutions support a simple task such quick selection of a single word or an entire content, they do not support quick selection of a particular item, object, character, group of characters, or group of words. In addition, they do not support equally well tasks performed at any location on the display ranging from tasks near the center of the display to those near the edge of the display. Whereas these solutions seek to support applications written for devices with touch sensitive displays, they do not support access to applications written for conventional notebooks and desktop devices designed for use with a mouse or touchpad. This effectively denies the user access to the host of applications that have been written for desktop and notebook computing devices. Furthermore, these existing solutions do not support “secondary click” actions and “mouse-over” actions commonly used in apps written for access by desktop and notebook computing devices. These existing solutions also do not support user setting of key control parameters to meet user preferences and user needs. Finally, these existing solutions do not support accessibility settings to enable the broadest set of users to access applications on these powerful devices.
We have developed methods and graphical user interfaces for pointing and selecting on computing devices with touch-sensitive displays that overcome the deficiencies of existing solutions.